The present invention relates to workload management (WLM), and more specifically, to the integration of the WLM logic of a component in an information technology (IT) environment with cross-component WLM software.
Customer IT environments consist of multiple components including hardware platforms, with associated operating systems, and multiple software products. The objective of the customer in such an environment is to manage this heterogeneous mixture in an efficient and cohesive way in order to achieve their business objectives, which are usually expressed to the IT environment in terms of throughput and performance objectives. To aid the customer in this exercise, a number of the components in the standard IT environment have introduced a form of workload management (WLM) to help reflect business priorities and objectives onto the lower-level requests that they process.
In addition to the WLM logic in such standard IT components, new cross-component products, such as IBM's EWLM, have been introduced to help coordinate WLM efforts over the environment as a whole. One challenge posed by such products is to efficiently enable the individual components to tightly integrate their own internal WLM efforts with cross-component WLM software so that the overall effect is harmonious and the impact on the customer in terms of effort and maintenance is minimized. The cross-component WLM software has awareness of much more of the business than the individual component, while the individual component is the only one aware of how external requests map into its own internal processing mechanisms. The latter situation is particularly true in the case of relational database systems (RDBMS) where business requests almost always break down into one or more internal requests.